"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Teaching at St. Hope Charter Schools: Why Does This Feel Like KIPP?

St. Hope Public Schools is comprised of four charter schools in Sacramento, CA, and they serve to richly supplement the lavish lifestyles for St. Hope's founder and Sacramento mayor, Kevin Johnson, and his wife, Michelle Rhee, who also serves as the Chairman of the Board for St. Hope Public Schools.

Inside St. Hope's dehumanizing school environments that are staffed largely by TFA recruits, we find KIPP Model practices, including enforced silence for most of the day, screaming at children, total control of student movement and activity, and "culture reboot" sessions for children whose behavior does not pass muster.

Along with interviews conducted with former KIPP
teachers, three teachers from two other No Excuses charter networks shared
their stories for this book.One was
from Ascend Learning, Inc. and the other two were St. Hope Public Schools,
Inc.These teachers were asked the
questions asked of former KIPP teachers, and the overlap of their responses was
striking.This should come as no
surprise, perhaps, since both charter chains share organizational and
pedagogical features derived from the KIPP Model.

As at KIPP, St. HOPE depends heavily on
Teach for America teachers.At St.
HOPE’s middle school, PS7, 15 of the 18 teachers were active TFA corps members
in 2014, and one other teacher was a former corps member.One of the former St. HOPE teachers noted,
“our principal, our deans, our superintendent, our HR people, our teachers that
get recognized frequently, are all Teach for America alumni.” She said that
with St. HOPE’s embrace of TFA, the “. .
. culture completely shifted. And it turned into a teach-to-the-test type
environment. And you know, suddenly all of our administration, there were tons
of turnover, and then there were tons of turnovers as far as teachers are
concerned—so the St. Hope now is just a completely different place than it was
three or four years ago.”…

Whether we are examining teaching
strategies, curriculum, stress levels, management, discipline, attrition,
school environment, parent relations, or intended outcomes, similar issues and
problems are encountered by No Excuses charter school teachers, whether at KIPP
or one of the many KIPP knockoffs…

Another teacher who had
worked at both KIPP and at St. HOPE had similar reactions to the total
compliance enforcement.She said she had
learned a great deal working in a charter school before quitting to go to work
in a public school, and that she was grateful for the experience.However, she said, “I wouldn’t wish it on
anyone who wanted to be a teacher for the long-term.”When I asked why not, she said, “It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing. And
it’s just, there are parts of it that are kind of a joke, you know, as far as
principals being promoted [from] within, after being teachers for two years,
and things like that. You know, totally unqualified people running every aspect
of the school.”

In
comparing the two charter school environments, she found St. HOPE a “step down”
from KIPP.When I asked for specifics,
she said:

It’s a step down from KIPP as far as the
commitment, because they didn’t require us to host Saturday school, which was a
requirement at KIPP. I had to be at school, you know, every Saturday. So PS7
did not require us to do that. PS7 did not require us to host students after
school and provide them with dinner. You know, we didn’t have to do that.
Whereas, at KIPP, we did.

The
other St. HOPE teacher had previously served as a teacher, teacher coach, and
public school administrator at both the building and central office levels
before returning to middle school teaching at St. HOPE.She echoed a number of the concerns that I
had heard from former KIPP teachers.She
felt pushed into an unfamiliar “mold” that she felt was “disrespectful to the
students.”As someone with a background
in research, she found the school’s student expectations “very contrary to what
research says about adolescent kids’ need to be able to grow and mature.” When
I asked her to be specific she said,

…all of student movement and activity is
controlled—l mean completely controlled by the adults. And by that I mean the
expectation is that students aren’t supposed to be talking in the classroom,
where my belief system says that children can’t learn if they can’t talk—and
that structured opportunities to practice language are critical for all
kids.

She
was visited on a regular basis and told her she was “too nice to the kids” and
“too soft on them.”She found “the
behavior that they modeled was, you know, very militaristic screaming at the
kids—I mean, shouting.”She found that
all the students in the school “were expected to line up in silence, facing
front, and accompanied by an adult for every transition in their day.” She
said,

…we’d waste 10 minutes [at every
transition] lining kids up to meet these expectations, making them, you know,
stand silently for a few minutes, walk in silence. If they didn’t, stop them
and, you know, do it again. And it just seems bizarre to me. And I tried to
meet the expectations of the school, to behave in the way that I was expected
to behave, but it just felt awful. I mean, it felt wrong in every way. And when
I found myself shouting at kids I just said, this is not right. This is not who
I am, and this is, I can’t do this.

As
at KIPP, St. HOPE uses the student paycheck as a way to control student
behavior.Students start the week with
100 dollars in their paycheck and must end the week with at least 70
dollars.During the week, teachers must
carry the clipboard with them at all times and record additions and deletions
to student paycheck totals for any offense.Students who got to Friday with less than 70 dollars on their checks
were subjected to “culture reboot.” The offenders were escorted to lunch, where

. . .they would
get their food and go eat lunch in silence in a large room that they had, and
some of them would have to turn and actually face the wall, but they weren’t
allowed to talk. So they had to eat their lunch in silence and then just sit
there and do worksheets for the 90 minutes that was this electives period.

She said that everything
about the control of movement and control of thinking left her with the sense
that “everything about it was cult-like,” and the emphasis on team and school
identity could not disguise a school environment where “kids do not feel
connected to their school.”Her
realization that her first year with St. HOPE would be her last came on one of
her many late evenings at school, as she tried to finish all the work that had
be done the St. HOPE way:

I actually tried to drink the Kool-Aid
for a while. And so I think there was really a moment where, you know, one of
the many, many, many evenings that I was at the school site at nine o’clock
trying to finish up what we were supposed to have done, just thinking, this is
insane. This is certainly not good for me, and I really don’t think it’s good
for them, and I just, I can’t drink the Kool-Aid anymore.

When asked what she would
tell a friend who was thinking about applying at St. HOPE, she said, “I’d say, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Let
me help you get a job somewhere else. I’ve helped three teachers leave there
since I left. What I would tell them is to expect untenable work expectations
that are very discouraging.”

New
York Times Magazine
reported in 2006 that KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, Amistad
Academy in Connecticut, and North Star Academy in New Jersey consistently
shared strategies and methods aimed to produce the high test scores.That list of KIPP emulators has proliferated
since then, and the emulation of KIPP methods with it.For instance, KIPP’s SLANT model for
classroom behavior (sitting up, listening, asking questions, nodding, and
tracking the teacher) is a widely shared strategy among No Excuses
charters.New York Times reporter, Paul Tough (2006), noted that David Levin
believes that, unlike KIPPsters, “Americans of a certain background
learn these methods for taking in information early on and employ them
instinctively” (para 39).

Because
KIPP students or the hundreds of thousands of other segregated charter students
in No Excuses lockdown schools are not among those “Americans of a certain
background,” they “need to be taught the methods explicitly.”Perhaps more eyebrows would have been raised
if No Excuses charter operators like Levin did not have gifted writers like
Paul Tough to make the paternalists’ condescension at least vaguely couched.

If
Tough had stated explicitly that Levin and Feinberg believe that brown and
black children of poor parents must be explicitly programmed to sit up, listen,
nod, and track the teacher in order to avoid chaos in the classroom, then the
KIPP Model’s ideology of the “Broken Windows” paternalism would have been clear
for all to see.This would surely
require the re-framing of the civil rights rhetoric of No Excuses schooling, at
least from those elites not entirely sanguine about corporate missionary work
aimed to isolate and treat, by behavioral and neurological alteration, the
defects of poor children.